Global Warming

“The message of Weitzman’s recent work has influenced the policy debates on climate change: the extreme scenarios matter. What we don’t know about climate change is more important, and more dangerous, than what we do.”

One of the most significant examples is the predictions of the amount of tropospheric CO2 in the future. Actually, analysis of the records held by the NASA Earth Observatory at Moana Loa on Hawaii reveal that the amount of CO2 is rising and the amount of rising is increasing. It has already hit a tipping point and the amount is unpredictable. See: http://www.earthenspirituality.com/tippingpoints/tippingpoints.pdf

“Weitzman ‘asked us to contemplate the risk of runaway effects’, or ‘tail risks’ that lie well outside the most likely scenarios, such as permafrost thaw, explains Harford. ‘Central estimates can lead us astray,’ says Harford, and’ it is only when we ponder the tail risk that we realise how dangerous climate change might be’. ‘The truly eye-opening contribution – for me, at least – was Weitzman’s explanation that the worst-case scenarios should rightly loom large in rational calculations,’ says Harford.”

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, in 2013 estimated that the greenhouse effect from methane is 34 times stronger than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period, and 86 times stronger over a 20-year period. Its potency decreases over time because methane is a relatively short-lived greenhouse gas, mostly breaking down under chemical reactions after about 12 years, whereas carbon dioxide persists in the atmosphere for centuries.”

Here, again, as with so many other reports, the author, whom I greatly respect, fails to point out that methane breaks down into CO2 and water. That’s a double whammy. So, methane breaks down “after about 20 years.” Why not stress that it breaks down into the highly persistent CO2 and water vapor which are both greenhouse gasses?

Heat and rainfall extremes have intensified over the past few decades and this trend is projected to continue with future global warming1,2,3. A long persistence of extreme events often leads to societal impacts with warm-and-dry conditions severely affecting agriculture and consecutive days of heavy rainfall leading to flooding. Here we report systematic increases in the persistence of boreal summer weather in a multi-model analysis of a world 2 °C above pre-industrial compared to present-day climate. Averaged over the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitude land area, the probability of warm periods lasting longer than two weeks is projected to increase by 4% (2–6% full uncertainty range) after removing seasonal-mean warming. Compound dry–warm persistence increases at a similar magnitude on average but regionally up to 20% (11–42%) in eastern North America. The probability of at least seven consecutive days of strong precipitation increases by 26% (15–37%) for the mid-latitudes. We present evidence that weakening storm track activity contributes to the projected increase in warm and dry persistence. These changes in persistence are largely avoided when warming is limited to 1.5 °C. In conjunction with the projected intensification of heat and rainfall extremes, an increase in persistence can substantially worsen the effects of future weather extremes.

US philanthropists vow to raise millions for climate activists

Matthew Taylor, The Guardian

“The Guardian reports that “a group of wealthy US philanthropists and investors have donated almost half a million pounds to support the grassroots movement Extinction Rebellion and school strike groups – with the promise of tens of millions more in the months ahead”. It adds: “Trevor Neilson, an investor and philanthropist who has worked with some of the world’s richest families, has teamed up with Rory Kennedy – daughter of Robert Kennedy – and Aileen Getty, whose family wealth comes from the oil industry, to launch the Climate Emergency Fund. Neilson, who has worked with figures such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson, said the fund was inspired by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg and the Extinction Rebellion protesters in the UK in April.” The report continues: “Neilson said the three founders were using their contacts among the global mega-rich to get ‘a hundred times’ more in the weeks and months ahead. ‘This might be the single best chance we have to stop the greatest emergency we have ever faced,’ he told the Guardian.”

Just when we need wise leadership and global cooperation, what we are seeing is internal fighting over rigid local opinions. It is like people on a train that has jumped the tracks and is headed down the mountain fighting over who gets access to the dining car first.

“The ultimate question that the Extinction Rebellion poses is this: Why should we care about human extinction? The geologic record suggests that humans will one day go extinct no matter what they do. So, what if that happens sooner rather than later?

The answer to those questions hinges on whether a person defines his or her community strictly in spacial terms and does not include temporal terms. In other words, are we a community of people only by space (and then only weakly at that) or are we a community that extends through both space AND time?

In other words, does it matter whether human culture continues?

Those who deny climate change are answering the last two questions “no.” If those who accept that climate change is largely human-caused do not see it as an existential question, they may as well be deniers.”

“The hardest minds to change are those who accept climate change as a reality, but cannot embrace the necessary steps implied by that belief. Will the Extinction Rebellion change that? I’d like to think the answer is yes. But I think a more thoroughgoing change in human hearts and perceptions will likely only come from actual catastrophic consequences hitting much larger groups of people and only if they understand that those consequences are the result of climate change.”

“How is it that the awareness of risk has become so blunted among so much of the world’s population?”

Exactly, we are like a frog in a pot of water that has gone sleepy whilst the water is steadily headed toward the boil. Will we jump out in time or not? That is the critical question we must answer.

“It also seems plausible that the infrastructure we have built—dams, reservoirs, roads, electric grids, seawalls, water systems, and other industrial and agricultural systems—will not withstand intact the heat, drought, floods, sea level rise, severe weather and other problems that unchecked climate change will bring with it. At the very least, we are unlikely to be able to reliably grow enough food to feed all of us.

How is it that the awareness of risk has become so blunted among so much of the world’s population? Of course, for the poorest among us—those who barely make it from one day to the next—risk is immediate, personal and abundantly clear. Lack of food, shelter, medical care and protection from violence are existential questions that command attention.”

“So please stop saying something globally bad is going to happen in 2030. Bad stuff is already happening and every half a degree of warming matters, but the IPCC does not draw a “planetary boundary” at 1.5°C beyond which lie climate dragons.”

Get angry, but for the right reasons

“What about the other interpretation of the IPCC’s 12 years: that we have 12 years to act? What our report said was, in scenarios with a one-in-two to two-in-three chance of keeping global warming below 1.5°C, emissions are reduced to around half their present level by 2030. That doesn’t mean we have 12 years to act: it means we have to act now, and even if we do, success is not guaranteed.”

“Climate change is not so much an emergency as a festering injustice. Your ancestors did not end slavery by declaring an emergency and dreaming up artificial boundaries on “tolerable” slave numbers. They called it out for what it was: a spectacularly profitable industry, the basis of much prosperity at the time, founded on a fundamental injustice. It’s time to do the same on climate change.”

“Give us God in whatever form She, He, It, or They consents to assume, so long as that transcendent something supplies us with an answer we can curl up around close enough to breathe ourselves to peace, or anyway to sleep. Lord give us this night our daily certainty.”

“The first step toward creating some way out of our dilemma may involve allowing our sense of certainty itself to unravel.”

Our modern technology has given us a strong sense of certainty by its “swap the board” or “replace the unit” fix. Unfortunately, main stream science uses a mechanistic model as a basis for “fixing” climate change. Even the measurement devices are designed for machines instead of a living Earth; a living being. Homo Sapiens have never encountered the present level of CO2 and some other green-house gasses. CO2 is now building up in the troposphere at an increasing level and the rate of increase is increasing. Further the rate of increase is variable and unpredictable.

There is no certainty and no meaningful computer models to assist in predictability.

Of course, this is green fodder for those paid to spread fear and doubt thus discrediting 97% of climate scientists who know that humans are accountable for this runaway increase in CO2, warming of the oceans and melting of polar icecaps to name a few climate variables. We accept uncertainty when our physician prescribes a remedy and then tells us that if it doesn’t work we are to return for an alternative. However, there is no loss of profits in that situation whereas keeping fossil fuel in the ground might throw a few people off the billionaire list! Sky 31 March, 2019

The Flight from Nature

“Nobody is going to come and get rid of anthropogenic climate change, either—not without putting a full stop at the end of the entire galaxy of extravagant energy-wasting habits that are treated as normal by modern industrial society. That this obvious conclusion is far from obvious to the people who do most of the talking about climate change—that it is in fact unthinkable to them—is, I think, a direct result of the way that modern lifestyles distance people from nature, and especially members of the well-to-do classes that play so central a role in climate change activism. The fact remains that a conclusion can be unthinkable and still be quite true.”

Just 19% of the 30 types of ecosystem transitions studied were happening in isolation.”

Carbon Brief Daily | 20/12/2018

There is no “could occur” about it. The tipping point has occurred and the feedback mechanisms are spinning away with runaway increases in greenhouse gasses. At the moment, greenhouse gasses are increasing at a rate of over 50% per decade and this rate is also increasing.